During the annual top conference of the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Professor Chris Wojtan was awarded the prestigious Significant New Researcher Award 2016. The jury based the decision on Wojtan’s achievements throughout the last years using numerical methods to simulate natural phenomena in a realistic and yet time- and cost-effective way. His research group developed fundamental new algorithms which allow a visualization of fluid dynamics or fracture of brittle material displaying fine, small-scale details in a large-scale behavior on the one hand while reducing memory usage and computing time on the other hand.

In addition to the recognition of Wojtan’s achievements with the ACM Award, the ongoing success of his research group was underlined by three publications at the 43rd ACM SIGGRAPH conference. PhD student Morten Bojsen-Hansen presented a publi- cation on a new algorithm that allows a seamless re-integration of a small simulation of local changes within a larger simulation, e.g. adding or deleting a rock including changes of wave patterns in an ocean scene. In another publication , PhD student David Hahn introduces a new way for simulating brittle fracture. The selective removal of certain parts of the computation for fracture lines leads to a much faster, but still satisfying result for the animation of cracking material. The recently developed algorithms might be taken up by game developers or engineers for future applications. Additionally, Hahn contributed to a second publication presenting a new simulation method where only relevant parameters of a liquid surface are computed, which still allows a simulation of the whole liquid volume. The adaption of the concerned equations resulted in a cost effective, yet feasible animation replacing current methods where super computers are required.